Abstract

Human infants seem to develop to acquire
common phonemes to adults without the capability
to articulate or any explicit knowledge.
To understand such unrevealed human
cognitive development, building a robot
which reproduces such a developmental process
seems effective. It will also contribute to
a design principle for a robot that can communicate
with human beings. This paper hypothesizes
that the caregiver’s parrotry to the
coo of the robot plays an important role in the
phoneme acquisition process based on the implication
from behavioral studies, and propose
a constructive model for it. We validate the
proposed model by examining whether a real
robot can acquire Japanese vowels through interactions
with its caregiver.